Partly because of his ties to Toronto, partly because of his job at the London Tube, Chris Upfold kept a close eye on the customer service storm that gripped the TTC last year. Soon, he will be in the thick of it. The TTC announced Monday that Mr. Upfold, a Walkerton, Ont. native who has held a variety of customer service posts at the London Underground over the last decade, will be its first chief customer service officer. He starts May 30, earning between $117,772 to $147,183. Mr. Upfold, 37, believes Toronto’s transit system has got a bit of a bad rap lately — “if you are pushing huge amounts of people through pipes in the ground, that’s a tough thing to do” — but he says there are ways to improve riders’ experience. An excerpt of his conversation with the

Post

’s Natalie Alcoba follows.

Q

What was the No. 1 lesson you learned at the Tube?

A

You’ve got to figure out a way to measure customer satisfaction and make it a hard and fast number, and put in place the business-case stuff where you can show that improving customer service actually helps your bottom line in a lot of ways… If you don’t measure it, you can’t change it.

Q

How much of customer service is simply ensuring that the trains arrive on time?

A

It’s definitely a big part of it. If you don’t run an on-time service, then customers aren’t going to care very much. You’ve got to get the basics right. Doesn’t mean it’s easy to do but you’ve got to have that bare bones operational stuff. There’s also quantity of time, versus quality of time. If you provide a quality service, then people will be more forgiving on the quantity stuff.

Q

So it changes their perception of the amount of time they’re spending?

A

Absolutely. The best example I can think of is that we have a lot more advertising in the London Underground than the TTC has. And part of that is because it generates revenue, and it gives us money to invest in other things. But it’s also because our customers like it. It gives them something to read. And we know that stations that have advertising have a lower perceived quantity of time. And it also proves to people that somebody is in control. Because the advertising is up to date. It’s clearly being replaced, it’s clearly being looked at, there’s a guiding mind here.

Q

Do you think the TTC could use more advertising, then?

A

I don’t think that’s what I’m saying. I guess I was just saying that people only think about advertising as revenue generation, but actually there is a customer benefit there that is a bit more ephemeral. And that is true of a lot of things that you do. Having a ticket-selling booth that is a controlled space, that doesn’t have notices taped to it, that is clean —that helps you sell tickets and it helps you do your job more effectively, but it also gives customers the perception that somebody is in control.

Q

What can TTC riders expect to see change in the short term?

A

Any change like this people think is easy, but it’s an organizational change, and that’s a three- to five-year plan. So in the short term, what I think is important is that I focus on making sure that when people take time out of their day to contact the TTC about something — send an email, telephone somebody, or just tell somebody in the station — that that is taken account of, and it’s systemized, and there’s a way of capturing that, capturing the scale of it, making sure that everybody in the organization knows what customers are talking about. And if you can get that link, that everybody is thinking about what customers care about, then that already starts to put you on the right path where other things become possible.